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An anonymous reader writes "After suffering manpower shortages and other issues, Debian says it has finally addressed concerns that it was falling behind on security. Debian's elected leader Branden Robinson yesterday flagged an inquiry into the processes by which security updates are released, citing a potential lack of transparency and communication failures. It was also an appropriate time to add new members to Debian's security team, as several have been inactive for a while, Robinson said. Debian initial security problems can be found in this earlier Slashdot posting."

i have one server thats running sendmail rather than the debian standard exim and both aptitude dist-upgrade (the reccomended upgrade method) and apt-get dist-upgrade wanted to remove it even after i manually upgraded it to the sarge version first.

i ended up using apt-get upgrade to upgrade the bulk of the system then upgrading a load of stuff manually with apt-get install and then finally finishing the job with apt-get dist-upgrade

mind you red hat basically tell you too take the system offline and use th

My mail server broke. I run postfix and need TLS to communicate with my upstream ISP. (My own IP is scorched earth it seems.) I didn't notice the bustage until a user complained. The bug appears to be 307780 [debian.org].

Being able to write some software and produce packages is very different from doing security. Security is something that many, even in the developer community, don't understand, or don't understand completely. Having someone who isn't completely security savvy declare your program secure does not help you very much.

Plus, Debian likely requires a lot of security people compared to other distro's, because 1) they provide very many packages (I can't say for sure more than any other, but it's likely), and 2) they don't only fix things by upgrading packages in unstable to the latest version, but also backport fixes to the version in stable.

And in the meantime, the rest of the organization needs not to be forgotten. New packages are submitted all the time, people do like to see a new release within their lifetimes, questions have to be answered, (non-security) bugs need to be fixed, etc. etc. etc. Debian is just a huge project, and I'm impressed with how well it works.

I've seen more than one distro provided security fix be put out for non-existant security issues, that were very obviously non-existant (eg, discussed on the mailing lists and proven to be non-exploitable).

Debian isn't the only group that fixed a non-existant bug (for Wine). Gentoo did it too, for Mozilla. There are probably more examples: these are ones I came across randomly without looking for them.

You are correct, I had mistaken Branden for Joey. Two names I see fly by very frequently.

I recalled an email [debian.org] to debian-devel about the security issue, where it was stated that only one member was left active.Only did I recall the name incorrectly, my apologies for the confusion I may have caused.

If you like Slackware, and if you've ever tried FreeBSD and seen the BSD "ports collection" system of installing stuff, then you'll probably love Gentoo. I used to be a die-hard Slackware user but use SuSE now since it's too easy and convenient and I've gotten lazy WRT keeping my Linux machines updated... SuSE's Yast Online Update takes all the work out of it.

I've had it running as a webserver/nagios server for the past 3-4 months, first as Sarge was still in testing, and now as stable, and it has not failed me yet. The only time I've had to reboot or anything was when we moved the server to our new rack (not a debian issue). I've not run into any packaging problems, and as for security, it seems pretty solid.

I know it's an old discussion, but I suppose you should ask yourself what you want to run it as. As a workstation, I think sarge is a great step forwar

I use slackware, myself, although I was thinking of giving Debian Sarge a try

Depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you are running a server, especially one that is exposed to the internet or a large number of users (e.g. web server), Debian stable is really great. Especially with the ability to setup automatic updates; you can set it up, and not have to really touch it for another 2-3 years.

If on the other hand you are using it for a desktop, development, or "tinkering" machine, Debian unstable

I used Slack before I switched to Debian, and never looked back. I don't know your reasons for using Slackware, but for me it was that I like to be in control and not clutter my system with useless stuff. Debian allows you a lot of flexibility, but its package management system (which I honestly believe is the best in the world) makes everything a lot easier.

You can have a very basic installation for about 100 MB. I personally think that's already a bit heavy, but it's definitely better than a lot of other distros. From there, you can get almost everything you care to mention, just by runnig apt-get install package-name. Dependencies are all taken care of automatically. You can customize how many questions you are asked during installation, from no questions to lots of options (and you can always re-run the configuration questions later).

In terms of quality, you can hardly go wrong with Debian. Everything is tested and tested again before it goes into stable (which is why there are such long times between releases), but even the packages in unstable tend to work just fine. I'd say unstable is about as up to date as Slackware-current, so if that's what you like, Debian can give it to you too.

Upgrading from one version of Debian to another is as simple as setting the right apt-repository and running apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade.

I don't know what more to say. Just try it for yourself.

(And for those who think I'm a Debian zealot: it's worse than that. I use OpenBSD at home.;-) )

I'm a long time Slack user (especially for servers) and every time I've tried another distro, I've always found myself switching back to Slackware. Nothing against Debian though. apt-get was nice but I've always been happy with swaret. I've also always been a big fan of Slack's rc files (probably due to me being a BSD fan). I've also had great luck with stability on Slack (2+ years uptime on one of my servers). I always found it fun to try something different every once in a while, but personally I wou

I like Sarge, but I've never used Slack. I've used it for about a year now. apt-get really is a great bit of software. Packages are designed to install and configure themselves intelligently, if not optimally. As long as you're not a pansy about typing into the command line, everything just works. But you can still tweak/install from source if you'd like. The default installation is not as slim as I'd like -- it weighs in at about 350 MB if you don't select any packages other than those "required" by

Free software is free for you to use, not free to develope.
Software engineers need to put food on the table, so they have to get a real job when there isn't any corporate sponsorship. So now after you take out the time from their busy schedules to survive, there's not a whole lot left for a life and helping develope your free software.
Now instead of a stream-lined process where coders can churn out results, you're left with only a little bit of support from those people, sometimes they get burnt out and

I've always wondered who these people were... I know that Linus was in college when he developed Linux, and that RMS actually was receiving money for sales of emacs when we first started... but who are the rest of the free software developers? Are they all academics? Corporate wageslaves like the rest of us whose company pays them to develop software and release it to the world? Are they mostly retirees? Independently wealthy? I'd love to contribute back to the OSS world, but other than a bug fix here

Well, it helps that most of what the rest of the world considers worthy expenditure of free time is exactly the kind of thing hackers "detest and avoid". http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/ [catb.org]
Watch the Superbowl? There's 6+ hours you could have had at least your own text editor right there. Watch TV at all? That's costing you a whole operating system per year. Carry a cell phone? I did the math once and figured out that I have added the effective 15 years to my life I lost from smok

you are confusing free as in $0, with free as in freedom.According to the Free Software Foundation, this includes:* freedom to run the program* freedom to study and modify the program* freedom to copy the program* freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public

so Free software is free(dom) to develop as well as use, but yes programers do have to eat.

When people talk of Free Software, at least on Slashdot and other technical communities, they are usually referring to the freedom to do whatever you want with the code. They are not usually referring to the price.

When people talk of Free Software, at least on Slashdot and other technical communities, they are usually referring to the freedom to do whatever you want with the code. They are not usually referring to the price.
then they should stop using the words "free software" that way. its confusing.
it makes me instantly suspicious that its the age old tendancy of technical people to try and make their field even more obscure and inpenetrable than it already is.

Lick me if i'm wrong- but aren't security problems good? I mean, I thought a completely insecure OS led to a monopoly and you becoming the richest man in the world.....
Why are they trying to fix the security issues? don't they know it is bad business?All you nipple are belong to us

I know people are modding you funny; but there is some important truth to what you said.

I've long said that Microsoft's greatest strength as a business is that they were the only software company who best calculated and acted on these risk/reward tradeoffs.

In all businesses there is a tradeoff between Security and other business needs including Time-to-Market and Ease-of-Use. Note that this problem isn't unique to the software industry. Credit card companies have the same challenges (ease of stealin

Now let's hope they won't stop there, and make a revamp of the whole Debian process. Debian needs to react to what's happening around it, and into it. Because we NEED Debian, much more than any other distro. If Debian happened to die, what choices would we have ? commercial distros, or distros based on commercial ones. That would suck big time. I don't even use Linux on the destop personally, I mostly use it at work on servers now. But i know i sleep better at night knowing that a thing such as Debian exis

The only reason to run Debian is if you believe in the politics behind the distro.

I could give a rat's ass about the politics of the distro.

Or the cost.

I run Debian because it is the easiest distro I've ever found when it comes time to update/upgrade.

I simply can't afford (nor can my customers) to take a machine to bare metal for an upgrade. And while most distros really try to make the upgrade from one version to the next easy... most are not "production quality" as far as I"m concerned.

If you want to deploy systems with a long service life, Debian is a fine choice.

I can't stand the politics of Debian. I use it because of apt-get dist-upgrade. I wait in vain for a better package manager that has a better version migration scheme, as well as having multiple mirrored online repositories (fedora doesn't count because it has nothing like dist-upgrade and doesn't plan to begin such a scheme til FC5 or later). A gentoo with an emphasis on stability and official support for portage overlays might be a good competitor. But I need a real distribution to run right now, not

If you think that way, please get involved! There are lots of ways you can help, the most obvious being reporting bugs and submitting patches for open problems. Debian is kept alive by people who care about it actually contribute.

It's talk like this that makes me nervous. WHAT, besides the install program and the apt-system, is so important about Debian that it and only it will do??? Did Debian suddenly do a hostile takeover of every single line of code in all of GNU, Unix, Solaris, Minix, and Linux combined? Will I still be able to read Emacs source code without Debian suing me? If anybody else uses KDE, will Debian sue them for copying the "look and feel"? Does Debian own pr

is that they make you jump through many loops before allowing you to help them. I have several pieces of software that I wanted to contribute to Debian, so I figured I might as well be the maintainer for them. I gave up eventually, because it's just too damn bothersome, and another Debian maintainer took my.debs over for me.

IMHO, that's why they have a shortage of manpower, because it's just not easy enough for people to jump in and help.

I agree, but what's the point of quality packages if the packages are so far behind? There needs to be a balance between trust and ease of contribution, so that stable packages are reasonably current. As it is now, they're obviously asking too much from potential helpers.

That's entirely the problem. Debian has a zillion packages but has trouble releasing due to everyone's pet project, be it a pet architecture or a pet library or whatever. Not enough people want to put together a coherent distribution, they just want their little feature taken care of. Witness the number of people working on core pieces of Debian like apt, dpkg, aptitude, etc in comparison to the total number of Debian developers.

Agreed. this is a problem with any large organization, and Debian is definitely one of them. These procedures exist to ensure quality, and they appear to work, but they also slow down progress. It's a double edged sword.

Debian has no such shortage of manpower. Doing a quick wc -l over the list of Debian developers gets 1,671 people. And that's just the development team, which doesn't include the list of Debian System Administrators (which, admittedly, is much shorter). Debian has enough people for what it does, and the list of contributors continues to grow.

The problem it was experiencing, however, was a shortage of people assigned to the security team, which has apparently now been resolved.

One of the problems is that, obviously, exploits can be known by The Bad Guys but not the software maintenance community (i.e. upstream maintainer, Debian package maintainer, Debian security folk). That's obviously bad.

A less obvious but perhaps more frequent problem is where security problems are discovered and announced in upstream packages, but the information doesn't flow down to all the distributions. There's no formalised or automated mechanism by which distribution security teams get alerted to relevant upstream security fixes. You might get duscussion of the problem on a mailing list which is specific to the upstream package, but the Debian Security team can't be expected to subscribe to all those lists.

Similarly though, you can't rely on upstream maintainers reliably notifying 19 (or however many) distribution security contacts for each security-relevant release. In the specific case of Debian, this sort of thing is the Debian package maitainer's responsibility. However, there are thousands of Debian packages; some of the maintainers are very responsive and some are less so. Even the responsive ones go on vacation sometimes.

I'm an upstream maintainer. I'm pretty sure that for some of the distrubutions, nobody has subscribed to the mailing list where security problems would be announced (bug-whatever@gnu.org). In this particular exmaple, Debian isn't one of them - the Debian maintainer in this specific case is very active.

However, having a single point where Linux-relevant security announcements could go would be useful. BUGTRAQ simply isn't it (partly because its mailing list software is somewhat broken, also because of the noise level due to broken out-of-office response programs, and because solving this problem isn't the goal of that mailing list). That way, at least the Debian Security team - among others - could count on being notified reliably about known problems.

Of course then you still have a workload for the security team of analysing problems, deciding on responses and preparing NMUs. That may indeed require more people - I'm not claiming that an aggregated feed of upstream security concerns and fixes solves the whole problem.

I think one of the main problems for debian stems from the use of.debs. Sure, they are still superior in a fews ways to rpms, but rpm has by and large caught up since rpm v3 and certainly rpm v4,

The baroque complexity of the debian/ subdirectory and build processes compared to an rpm.spec file is really discouraging for developers wanting to package their stuff up for debian.

Similarly, while apt trailblazed decent dependency handling, the latest versions of yum are catching up and, extremely importantly, it is far simpler to set up a yum repository than an apt one - so third party developers can very simply set up a website with a small repository and manage it themselves.

There'd be initial massive outcry I guess, but if Debian were to just adopt rpm, life would become much simpler./usr/src/debian/RPMS...

Yeah, and you had to post that as an AC just to prevent the Debian zealots (like me) from finding out your identity.:-(

I've always hated the RPM-based distros for getting more successful using an inferior technology and giving many people the impression that package management on Linux was hard, while Debian made everything easy with apt-get.

However, the times have changed. apt-get works for RPMs now, and automated package managers are finally working for RPM-based distros. Maybe the time has come for a standard in packaging land, and maybe that standard can indeed be RPM.

However, notice the many maybes. Having a standard is only helpful if every distro actually uses the same packages, and I'm not very sure that is going to happen. Without that, software still has to be packaged separately for each distribution, and there is little use for standardizing the format. In that case, the best course for Debian is to stick to their own format; if it ain't broken, don't fix it.

Having a standard is only helpful if every distro actually uses the same packages, and I'm not very sure that is going to happen. Without that, software still has to be packaged separately for each distribution

A few conditionals in a single.spec file are often all that is needed for RedHat-Fedora-CentOS/Mandriva/SuSE . Very little effort indeed if you're depending on LSB rather than using RedHatisms.

Yes, you might still need to build different binary RPMs for the different RPM distros, but they can all

Having a standard is only helpful if every distro actually uses the same packages

There are also advantages just to sharing the same packaging system--sharing of bug fixes for rpm itself, ability to easily transfer rpm-building or -using skills from one distribution to another, etc.

I agree with half of what you say. I've made both RPMs and debs and I find that RPMs are the clear winner. They are faster to install, easier to package, and smaller. The "extra flexibility" that dpkg gives you is not only unnecessary, it's a liability.

Besides, who wants their apt-get upgrade to stop every 2 minutes and ask inane questions?? Debconf sucks! Even with priority=high it acts like a stupid nieghbor that always wants to chat. RPM gets this right: install sensible defaults and let the user change stuff using a sensible interface AFTER the package is installed.

Finally, it's looking like development on apt/dpkg is largely stalled out. At least, except for package signatures, I haven't seen a user-visible change since, oh, 2000 or so.

Yum, on the other hand... COULD IT BE ANY SLOWER?? "apt-get install nmap" takes all of 4 seconds. "yum install nmap" on FC4 takes over 30 seconds as it draws endless progress bars. I have no idea why it takes so long. I like Yum's simple config files, but it's moot until they fix its speed issue.

Finally, it's looking like development on apt/dpkg is largely stalled out. At least, except for package signatures, I haven't seen a user-visible change since, oh, 2000 or so.

How is this bad? It's retaining a consistent interface for people to build other tools and scripts upon.

The one thing I'd really like to see in apt, which probably belongs more with dpkg (which apt uses) than anything else, is proper tracking of when packages are installed and removed. There have been several occasions w

I think one thing people misunderstand about packages is not necessarily the format of the package itself (which is certainly important), but the robustness of the tools with which you can operate on those packages. Part of your comment is targeted in that direction, and I agree. Tools are converging in features. Improvements are being made across the board on both camps. dpkg and apt, for example, have some interesting enhancements on deck. Just check out the dpkg ChangeLog [debian.org] if you're looking for examp

To do the same with an RPM is to open up a hex editor to find the end of the RPM header, then use dd to cut it off and output the remaining tarball. (RPM format) How many people know or want to know how to do that?

Bah, IIRC Xandros doesn't update it's distro, at all. They just release a version and you have to wait for the next release (and buy it) for bug fixes (and of course the release will bring new bugs since they'll add features). I don't know if they have the same policy concerning security fixes, but i wouldn't trust them at all...

Debian was my first GNU/Linux distribution. 1.3 was the stable at the time, but I ran the 2.0 unstable canidate. For a while I've used others... but I always come back to Debian. The Debian Security Team is a big part of the reason. The comunity nature of Debian, and the history of Debian represent a real important part of the Free Software comunity.

Security is often a thankless job. People only care once something goes wrong. They don't see all the work it takes to coordinate timely security responce. It should also be noted that Debian takes a proactive approach to security with the Debian Security Audit Team.

Debian lost a lot of its reputation with the delays for the current stable release. I think the future of Debian, if its to keep its reputation, will be to move to a standard release cycle of once every 2 years. Sure the Debian releases are few and far between compared to other distributions, but Debian is about software Freedom, not bleading edge technology. It provides a solid and secure OS, and most system administrators don't want to roll out a new version of an OS every 2 years, in fact, most would rather keep running an OS as long as there are security updates.

There are certainly a lot of challanges for Debian right now, hopefully the "Security Issue" goes away with this change.

Debian lost a lot of its reputation with the delays for the current stable release.

How's that possible? Debian's reputation revolves around the slow release cycle. Ask anyone about Debian and they'll likely include 'slow release on stable' as part of their comments, whether they like Debian or not.

There is long, and then there is long. People were expecting it to come out sooner, and it was met with delay after delay. Long release cycles are fine if you tell people about them, but when people expect that you'll be releaing a new version next year and it turns into 3 years later... well... Needless to say, for a while a lot of Debian users moved to more current alternatives.

Debian lost a lot of its reputation with the delays for the current stable release

I disagree. I run servers for commercial clients. A large number of these prefer to run some type of free software as a server platform these days. Debian is an attractive platform because of the care that goes into it. The slow release cycle means that time can be spent on thorough, careful software engineering. Distributions with faster release cycles are rarely as reliable as Debian over the longer term. I and my clients

Well, my DSL-Router/Firewall/Printerserver/Fileserver is running Debian. And doing so for 2 years without much trouble/attention and barely a reboot. I don't even have a keyboard or monitor attached to it. And it's running the "unstable" branch.

Granted, Debian is not really for the Desktop weenies. But my desktop is OS X. So no problem with that.

Debian is far from becoming irrelevant. Where did Knoppix start? Xandros? Ubuntu?

These and many other distros can be seen, under the right light, as branches on a Debian trunk. I feel fairly confident in saying that no other distro could provide a sufficiently robust and broad base upon which to build.

Ubuntu and company can do as they please. Some may, eventually, cease to be recognizable as Debian-based, but that will take a very long while.